London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

Nothing is more personal than a shopping basket. At the supermarket you can learn more about someone’s intimate habits than you might think: what brands they favour, how much alcohol they consume, even their choice of loo paper (quilted or bog standard). So President Assad must be feeling painfully exposed, having his shopping habits exposed to the world via a cache of leaked emails.

Julian Assange is at the Old Vic Tunnels tonight supporting a new film called Europe’s Last Dictator about Belarus. But will the activist Belarussians thank him? Assange has been invited to moderate the Q&A after the screening of the documentary, which is narrated by Joanna Lumley.

The former Army captain who granted Julian Assange refuge at his 600-acre Norfolk estate has told how the whistleblower has become like an "uncle" to his family - despite turning their lives upside down.

Imagine the scene. It's a cold February day and novelist Andrew O'Hagan, new notebooks and a tape-recorder in his bag, has traipsed up through dank Norfolk fields to meet the man whose autobiography he has agreed to write. His subject is Julian Assange, who has taken to country life.

Wise heads always foresaw that Julian Assange was the sort of man who would change the world for ever. And so he has. By authorising the unredacted release of 250,000-odd leaked US embassy cables, with information that could be used to identify and punish whistleblowers and dissidents in repressive regimes worldwide, he has achieved the almost unimaginable. He has made it feel, for the first time, that sensitive information is on the whole safest left in the trust of the CIA. Nice one, Jules. Keep fighting the good fight, yeah?

Word is we need to loosen up. According to Martin Thomas, author of Loose: The Future of Business is Letting Go, Londoners are flexible, "yet the City is still bathed in a very tight way of thinking. It's dangerous".